Free Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran

theclues were there, but I couldn’t put them together in a way that made sense.
    I knew one thing. He wasn’t happy to see me.
    And whatever he knew about Vic Willing, I wouldn’t get it easy.
    On his arms he had a series of tattoos, most of them coded references to neighborhoods, housing projects, gang affiliations, and sundry other historical markers, in bold gothic print. One tattoo stood out. It was on the back of his right hand. In fancified, delicate script, it said LALI .
    â€œWho’s Lali?” I asked.
    â€œNo one,” he said. It was the first time he’d spoken to me: his voice was deep and his accent was heavy. “No one” came out as one short, hostile word:
no-un
.
    â€œNo one,” I repeated. “I got some tattoos like that too.”
    He ignored my attempt at a joke. For a split second, I saw something in his face. It was a question, asking for something.
Save me
, it said. Or maybe
Kill me
.
    â€œShe your girlfriend?” I asked.
    He looked away again and didn’t say anything.
    â€œVic Willing disappeared sometime during the storm,” I said. “I’m trying to find out what happened to him.” I’d noticed that when people in New Orleans said “the storm” they didn’t mean the literal storm, which only lasted a few hours. They mean the whole week, the time between when evacuations began and when they ended seven or eight days later.
    Andray didn’t say anything.
    â€œCan you tell me where you were?” I asked. “During the storm?”
    â€œConvention Center,” he mumbled.
    â€œLet’s start earlier than that,” I said. “Let’s start with Friday night. The Friday before the storm. What’d you do that Friday night?”
    He took a deep breath and sat up a little and looked at me directly for the first time.
    â€œFriday night,” he said. “Friday night was just normal.
Sunday
night, that’s when it started. We went down to the Superdome.We got out of there
fast
. They didn’t want to let no one out, but we found a way.”
    â€œ
We
?” I said.
    Andray nodded. “Me and Terrell,” he said.
    â€œWho’s Terrell?” I asked.
    Andray looked like he was surprised I didn’t know Terrell. It wasn’t unreasonable in New Orleans, where everyone knows each other.
    â€œNo one,” Andray said, blinking. “A guy I know. You ain’t know him. It was me, him, and Trey. Trey, he gone, so you ain’t getting no alibi from him. So then I start looking for my girlfriend, Lali. Ever since the storm she don’t want nothing to do with me, but then she was my girlfriend. So I go to this house where she’s at and I get her. Then, me and Terrell and Lali and Trey, we go looking for my mother.”
    â€œYou find her?” I asked. I hadn’t known he still knew his mother. That wasn’t in the file.
    He shook his head, and came to life, which in this case meant getting angry.
    â€œSo then I went down to the Superdome, to look for her,” Andray went on. “By then, they had people in the Convention Center too. So we went over there and, you know, that was some fucked-up shit. So me and my friend Peanut—he dead so don’t waste your time looking for him—we go off and we got a car for everyone to get out of town in. And so me, Terrell, Peanut, Pee Wee, Lali, Peanut’s little sister, her kids, Pee Wee’s girl,
her
kids—we all drove out to Houston. Drove right up to the Astrodome, and those mothafuckas turned us down. Said we weren’t authorized or some shit like that. But then these other people, they saw us get turned away. And they took us back to their own house, their own house where they lived, and they made us dinner, found us a place to stay, all that. Nelson, was their name. Tom and Mary Nelson. So, you know,” he said, in case I was wondering, “they got some good people out there